Monday, February 17, 2014

It has been made officially clear to me that the Blog I worked on from the end of 2004 until just recently is for all intents and purposes *dead*.

In my view that is unfortunate, because by starting just a few years after I started working for Microsoft fulltime, it is a chronicle of Internationalization and World Readiness know how that spans the bulk of my i18N career at Microsoft, at least!

As I have shown in another blog
here, most of it is still reachable, so although some of the readymade samples are gone, most of the Blog's actual content is still available in a way that cannot be taken away.

Long live the amazingly wonderful website called The Internet Archive @ http://archive.org !!

Now a part of me wants to find my favorite blogs and liberate them to this new Blog. Perhaps it would be exciting to re-inflate the Blog this way. I would enjoy it, and scrolling through nine years of blogs would be exciting, don't you think? ;-)

Monday, February 10, 2014

In my post the other day, I talked about the way that all of my reading habits have been changed by using Audible Books via their App on my Nokia Lumia 1520 running Windows Phone 8.

And I couldn't be happier, truth be told!

Right now as I type this, I am listening to (and thusly re-reading!) "The Rainmaker" by John Grisham (read by Frank Muller), a book which helps remind me why although I'm a big fan of Audible Books, I'm such a huge fan of movies based on books.

That movie was okay, yes. But it is hard to compete with the almost 17 hour Unabridged Audible Book by using a less than two hours Hollywood movie.

The book is almost entirely in Rudy Baylor's head. And not even famous actors achieving excellent performances can really compete with that.

In the end, the main reason the movies do so well is something that authors like John Grisham will readily admit -- comparably few people both see the movie AND read the book.

And all the ones who do will say (even if they liked the movie) that the book was better.

Nor can I claim that this is due to nothing beyond coincidence. The book before this one from Audible was a re-reading of "Presumed Innocent" by Scott Turow (read by Edward Herrmann). In both cases, this one with over fifteen and a half hours of unabridged novel versus another ~2 hour movie, the book, will once again win.

My next book would further prove the point -- friend and colleague Mark Russinovich's "Zero Day" (an Audible book read by Johnny Heller), which at trim over nine and a half hours will be the thinnest proof this week that the book is always better (though that last book currently has no movie to prove the larger point again).

I am beginning to believe that Orson Scott Card had a point when he talked about the irony of people telling him that his book (Ender's Game) was so good that it ought to be a movie.

The book will (almost always) be better!

Almost subconsciously I am reminded of the ultimate example of a book that can't be done properly by a movie (and ultimately wasn't) -- the homicidal car Christine by Stephen King. Another book almost entirely written from the point of view of the car makes no sense whatsoever as a movie; I didn't even bother trying the Audible version of that one!

I will of course mention that Amazon got to charge me once more for the Audible version of most of the books I mentioned here....

One of the other problems with lots of book reading is that over time your passive vocabulary gets much, much bigger.

If you look at the Wikipedia article about Vocabulary it talks about the process a word routinely goes through in the journey from "Huh?" to fluent understanding:

Never encountered the word.

Heard the word, but cannot define it.

Recognize the word due to context or tone of voice.

Able to use the word and understand the general and/or intended meaning, but cannot with the word – its use and definition.

Fluent with the word – its use and definition.

Now obviously moving into the world of "passive vocabulary" will alter the process.

The article explicitly distinguishes it by calling it "reading vocabulary" outright. Think of it the same way, though.

In my own past, when reading the book "Gorky Park" by Martin Cruz Smith (the later Audible Books version read by Henry Strozier). I tripped over the word "ennui", which my passive or reading vocabulary called "enn-you-eye" even though I was aware of the word pronounced "ahn-wee" (even though I had no conscious idea how it is spelled) That kind of problem would never happen with an almost fifteen hour Audible book!

(In contrast, the less than two hour movie doesn't even include the scene in question.)

Which is not to say that there are never mistakes in Audible Books. In Gorky Park, Henry Strozier pronounces the last name of one of the murder victims (Davidova, as in Valeria Davidova) with the emphasis on the "do" rather than the way the movie and my Russian home health care assistant placed it (on the "vi").

Though I don't necessarily trust movies to always get it right, I do trust my Russian home health care assistant and how she would pronounce it! ;-)

But that kind of thing is relatively uncommon, and happens much less often than mistakes like mine with ennui.

At the same time, I really enjoy "reading" this way, which for me now feels like the only way to read, to enjoy a book truly.

You may not agree, and that is okay, too. I know what I love. What you love is allowed to be different....

I realize by not following every word in a reader like the Kindle leaves me vulnerable to the same kinds of passive vocabulary error that I had years ago with "ennui" but I don't mind. I want to enjoy the books I read and re-read, not merely treat them as vocabulary stretching exercises and nothing more. Don't you feel the very same way? ;-)

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Time for something a little off the topic of anything remotely related to Microsoft.

Let's talk about some other people's products and applications that I use. ;-)

Just for example, I have had a Kindle since it first came out. 1.0, even. I used to read books - both ones I had read before but not in some time, and new books.

Now I never upgraded after that first one because for a long time I never saw it adding any features I needed. I'm not truly a typography wonk, so new versions weren't providing anything that I needed.

Until they put a free Kindle App on Windows Phone, and then I never used my Kindle again.

I didn't need to; I now had any book I wanted in the device I most like to use!

Nothing could get between me and my KindleApp.

Nothing except for...

There is this little company named Audible.

They read the book for you and more to the point to you, like other technologies such as Recorded Books and others that let you have the book read to you.

Because I don't know about you but as long as I can bookmark any the book I like I really don't need the book itself.

Audible title from Amazon, I might never give Amazon another cent for a book!

Now not everyone reads books the same way as I do, so YMMV, but I doubt that I'm the only person who will not be reading books the way I used to read them.

Unless Amazon buys Audible or something they may find themselves unable to have control of how books are bought for many people.

I mean, it is great that the title might have been bought on Amazon, but it might not have been. And clearly this other company is now in control of discounts and deals and such.

One day, people will come to their senses and not buy two copies of every book, so the fact that Audible uses Amazon by default means that they didn't want to have to rebuild a storefront themselves when Amazon has one. So why not be an Amazon store? ;-)

The real advantage that Audible has is that often person reading the book is a celebrity or expert and that having them read it adds extra value that often translates into higher value.

Which often translates
higher prices. Some of which is likely due to the cost of compensating the celebrity or expert, but there is likely a lot of wiggle room there....

Now I just have to get "Love Monkey" by Kyle Smith and "How to Embalm Your Sister and Other Useful Skills" written by Darius the Dark into Audible's collection (both are in Kindle's!). Anyone have friends over at Audible? ;-)

I guess it isn't really a problem if people are happy to have their books read to them. That is good since it now covers how *I* use Audible. And I have learned a lot. I'll tell you about it in a later blog....

I suspect this is a mistake in the KL design, where someone accidentally typed "017" when he or she had to type "017C", confusing 0 and C or dropping the trailing C or something.

Is U+0017 actually what is supposed to be there? I doubt it, because if you really need to input U+0017 for whatever reason, this KL already supports it as [Ctrl]+VK_W.

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Now whether you like that particular keyboard layout or not, and I pretty much don't like this kind of multilingual keyboard layout, I certainly wouldn't ever want to have it with such a bug.

But perhaps the fact that nobody ever reported the problem through actual USE would tend to indicate that at a minimum that particular letter is never used!

Anyway, triage approved of fixing the bug, and I was able to fix it in place atop the existing layout. Even at the time, many were impressed that the Blog was finding bugs so obscure that even the French Canadian Standards people didn't notice!